The Cutthroat

Dashwood wondered how the Chief Investigator had caught wind of the murder of a lowly prostitute two hundred miles from New York, but he was not surprised. “No. Just strangled.”

“Do you know that for sure, James?”

“I saw her at the morgue with my own eyes, Mr. Bell. Only strangled.”

“No mutilation?”

“No blood.”

Dashwood listened to the telephone wires hiss. He waited, silent, knowing that the Chief Investigator did not clutter thinking time with small talk.

“How did you happen to be at the morgue?”

“You had your Anna Waterbury killed in New York, Mr. Bell. I figured it was worth checking for a connection. I spoke with the coroner. He confirmed there wasn’t a mark on Lillian except for the bruises on her throat.”

Again, a long silence. Finally, Bell asked, “Did you check her fingernails?”

“That’s the one strange thing. She didn’t scratch him.”

“Any broken nails?”

“Several, but none that looked freshly broken.”

“No skin under them, no blood?”

“No.”

“Might she have been wearing gloves?”

Dashwood said, “She was not a girl who could afford gloves. Besides, she died quick. It looks like her neck was broken.”

“Broken?” asked Bell. “By a blow?”

“No. The coroner said it happened while she was strangled.”

“A strong man.”

“Probably. But she was a tiny little thing. Wisp of a girl.”

“But otherwise not a mark on her?”

“No cuts.”

“Thank you, James. It was a long shot. Send me your full report. Immediately.”

Isaac Bell hooked the earpiece, jumped to his feet, and paced the detectives’ bull pen. Fact was, he could pace from 42nd Street to the Battery and back, but none of his leads, if they could be called leads, had gone anywhere. As time passed, it looked increasingly unlikely that his detectives would turn up a witness who saw Anna with whoever got her inside the flat where she died. Equally unlikely was the prospect of finding a witness — other than the procurer he had already interviewed at Grand Central — who saw her with any man anywhere during her weeks in New York.

He told the Van Dorn operator to place a long-distance call to the Philadelphia field office.

“Helen, I want you to go to Waterbury, Connecticut. Get Anna’s mother to talk to you. Find out if the girl kept a diary. If she did, read it.”

“To find if she had a boyfriend, who might have followed her to New York?”

“Exactly.”

“I thought you were sure she didn’t.”

“I’m not sure of anything anymore, including whether the murder was personal. So we’re back to the question we ask about every crime: Who had motive?”

* * *

“Who had a motive?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.

“A boyfriend, or a disappointed suitor, or a lunatic,” said Bell.

“In other words,” growled the Boss, “you’ve learned nothing about him.”

The powerfully built, red-whiskered founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a hard-nosed, middle-aged Irishman who had immigrated to America, alone, at age fourteen. Prosperous now by his own hand, “the Boss” had been born with little more than the charm and natural good cheer to cloak his fierce ambition and a deep hatred of criminals who abused the innocent. His manner, that of a friendly businessman, had surprised many a convict who found himself manacled facedown on the floor, having allowed the big, smiling gent to get close.

Isaac Bell had apprenticed under Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had introduced the banker’s son to the lives lived by people he dubbed “the other ninety-seven percent of humanity” and had trained a champion college boxer in the “art of manly defense” bred to win street fights with fists, guns, and knives. To say that Isaac Bell would march into Hades with Van Dorn on short notice would be to underestimate his gratitude.

“Your report states that Mike Coligney’s plainclothes boys found her body.”

“The actor whose home was the apartment where the girl was murdered used his landlady’s telephone to call the police.”

“As well he should, for a police matter,” Van Dorn said sharply with a sharper glance at his Chief Investigator.

Bell said, “He called the police because he had no way of knowing that Anna Waterbury’s father hired the Van Dorn Detective Agency to find his daughter.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that the client believed in us and trusted us. The Van Dorn Detective Agency is morally bound to find her killer.”

Joseph Van Dorn shook his head. “The police have the men — patrol officers and detectives and their informants.”

“We are more qualified to find the guilty man and build a case that sticks.”

“It is a police matter,” said the Boss. “Leave it to the police. They know the neighborhood.”

“I’ve already sent Helen Mills to Waterbury to persuade Anna’s mother to let her read the girl’s diary.”

“What for?”

“In case,” said Isaac Bell, “the murderer didn’t live in the neighborhood.”

9

When the Springfield, Massachusetts, Christ Church choir practiced for Easter service, every singer cocked her ear to hear Mary Beth Winthrop set the standard for the first sopranos.